When algorithms attack! Facebook made it easy to organize siege of the Capitol

National Post, 28 May 2021

The FOB was asked to investigate Facebook’s ban of President Donald Trump after the lethal violence at the Capitol.

The supreme court released its ruling in the matter of Facebook and the Capitol siege. Not that Supreme Court. The Facebook “supreme court”. Reading between the lines, it was an indictment of how Big Tech, not entirely unlike Big Tobacco before it, is more than complicit in the malign effects resulting from the voluntary use of its product.

What’s the Facebook supreme court? In 2019, Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook itself did not want to be the final arbiter in matters of free speech on its platform. It was an acknowledgement that Facebook is not a regular company, facing the discipline of the market while striving against other competitors. Facebook is more like the old telephone monopoly; shutting down an account is akin to cutting off access to the phones, which was tantamount in an earlier time to denying access to the mails.

So Facebook set up the Facebook Oversight Board (FOB), giving it a trust fund of $130 million to provide some kind of independence. The twenty members (selected by Facebook) were the sort of grandees that one usually finds on an eminent persons UN panel looking into this or that. There is Sudhir Krishnawamy, vice chancellor of the National Law School of India University, for example, and Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the first woman prime minister of Denmark who went on to serve as chief executive of Save the Children.

The FOB was asked to investigate Facebook’s ban of President Donald Trump after the lethal violence at the Capitol. More than 9,000 submissions were received from the public, and the ruling was handed down on May 6.

The board upheld Trump’s suspension for violating Facebook’s standards, but said that Facebook was wrong to make it “indefinite.” The suspension should have a fixed duration and clear conditions under which it would be lifted. Facebook has six months, should it choose to honour the FOB ruling, to figure that out.

The ruling is another acknowledgement that Facebook is more a public utility than a private company; a criminal convicted of running an illegal grow-op would not be banned indefinitely from buying electricity in the future.

So far, rather unremarkable. But there was more, which got relatively less attention. The FOB lacks subpoena power; it is an internal auditor which can only report if it didn’t see what it needed to see. It did just that.

Continue reading at the National Post.